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Sunday, November 21, 2010

VeganMoFo: Orecchiette Con Broccoli

It's official. I am completely in LOVE (or maybe obsessed is a better word) with broccoli! And it's all thanks to rain-covered basil leaves... and a phenomenal recipe by the Urban Vegan.

A few nights ago I was all set to make my famous pesto pasta recipe for dinner. A Bulls game was about to come on TV, CH and I had both suffered through very, very long days, and all I wanted to do was sit down to a quick, easy, reliably-delicious pesto dinner. Instead, what I got was a total recipe upset.

To my complete and utter dismay, the basil that I'd bought at Trader Joe's the night before had gone bad. It was bright green and gorgeous on the outside, but as soon as I opened the package, well... let's just say it wasn't pretty.

Turns out a bunch of rain drops had surreptitiously made their way inside the package as I'd walked to my car on a rainy night, destroying the first lovely bunch of basil that I'd found in months. Ugh!

Attempting to avoid disaster - and benefit from the fact that I already had a pot of water boiling on the stove, and a craving for pasta in my tummy - I grabbed the nearest cookbook and opened it to the first "tabbed" page that I could find.

A recipe for Orecchiette Con Broccoli was staring back at me, so I figured, what the hell? Broccoli, olive oil, garlic: the gang's all here. It might not be pesto, but it'll do.

Well, do did it ever! All I can say is that if you don't already own The Urban Vegan cookbook, you should purchase it for this recipe alone. Seriously. It's that deceptively good. In fact, I'm considering making it once a week from this point forward, so there might be a shortage of "baby trees" on the horizon.